Steropes
by sproino
Summary: Steropes is a Hephaestus-class Scorpian fleet tender. A pre-First War ship, she was mothballed only a decade after the war. Five years before the Fall, she's sold to Eris Evitabile Corp. in a backroom deal to save the Adar administration. Maj. Alexandros Shaddrach (ret.), owner of Eris Evitabile, is an expert on disaster recovery, and the Fall is the biggest disaster ever.
1. Chapter 1

**I claim no ownership of any recognizeable setting, character, or plot element, but assert fair use. I make no money from this, and have very little money otherwise. A raddish might be red, but you can't bleed it any more than a turnip.**

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There are worse things than being told you are a useless relic. For example, you could actually be a useless relic.

But this was far, far worse.

It had been eight months since the news had come down that that bastard, President Adar, was cutting the budget, the entire division was was being dissolved for redundancy, the young blood was being shuffled around the fleet, and the old men who knew what was going on were being given a nice, fat, juicy early retirement on a full pension to shut them up.

No, there are worse things than being told that your services are no longer needed. Things such as being told that when you know full well that they are still needed, and that innocent people will die in their absence.

The Disaster Response and Mitigation Division was always the redheaded stepchild of the Colonial Fleet Engineering Service, half of the institutional behemoth of the Logistics and Engineering Command. Unlike the rest of LEC, DRMD officers didn't merely ride desks; they would go out and (briefly) command any and every asset the Colonial Fleet had, and quite a few seconded over from the civil authorities.

As Adar's edict worked its way though committees and boards, legislation and the eternal red tape of the military, the DRMD fought back. Without authorization, but with the same vigor they would try to solve an astroid bound for a population center, a burning tyllium refinery, or any more tangible disaster, they applied their same methods to solving the political disaster of their dissolution.

After all, their office was the most active in the Fleet! No Cylons had been seen in nearly four decades, and the battlestars in the Fleet, despite being less than a fifth of their capitol ships by numbers, took up a full half of the budget, and they only ever seemed to be used to hunt pirates. Scarcely one in ten marines had seen action in their entire career since the end of the war, and most of that was corralling civilians during riots and protests.

It's the DRMD that's active for its purpose at least once a month. Manage this firestorm, evacuate this city, stabilize that anchorage from a decaying orbit over a populated planet, rescue the survivors when a spaceliner and a freighter collided and some idiot nugget managed to jump their raptor inside the resulting wreckage. Unimaginable disasters happen constantly, and having a dedicated team of experts to take command or advise local fleet assets is only sensible.

It was all for naught, one meeting with a member of the Admiralty revealed as the end drew near. The DRMD had been offered up as a sacrifice to Adar by the scheming Admiralty just because it was so important. Adar's plan to shift much of the military's operations to private contractors seems, to the uninitiated, ideal for the DRMD, but in reality it would end in disaster. The Admiralty simply refused to disabuse the President of the notion that his plan would work, knowing that support for his further efforts to privatize the military would be doomed by the inevitable disaster that would result from this first effort.

And so, betrayed by its government and military leadership, the DRMD died a quiet, bureaucratic death six months after Adar took office. The elderly Colonel who had nominally commanded the office and managed most of the paperwork was brevetted to Commander, retired, and died of a heart attack two weeks later. The Major who had managed most of the field operations was brevetted to Colonel, forced into retirement, and had organized a corporation with most of the rest of his forcibly retired staff and put out feelers for doing disaster preparedness consulting in the private sector.

And thus, eight months into the Adar administration, Maj. Alexandros Shadrach, CF (Ret.) found himself losing a staring contest with his radio as his wife tried to hand him his coffee. A moment later, the seldom-used television was on, and showing the burning Pegasus without power in a slowly decaying orbit over Canceron.

His phone was ringing, and he knew what the call was about.

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**This is an idea that's been rattling around in my head for, oh, about a decade now. The Colonies had such a long history before the Fall, but we only get to see small pieces of what was left after the Fall. This long and rich history of space mining, colonization, an internecine conflict had to have given rise to diverse military institutions and doctrines, yet we only see the post-Unification doctrine designed to stand against the Cylons.**

**In the main series, we get to see two battlestars in depth, another in passing, and the barest minimum of a non-battlestar warship, possibly having been converted to civilian use. Navies have massive numbers of non-combat vessels. I wanted to shine a bit of light there. There were more diverse ship classes before the Fall and especially before the unification of the colonies. I wanted to shine some light there.**

**I am absolutely, positively not having another battlestar survive the fall. It's been done to death.**

**There's also a tendency in fanfiction to have any added moral voice coming from a position of strength and moving as a savior. While the moral voice I'm inserting into the story does have a platform, it's not a very strong one. While the additional ship I'm having survive seems to be a great boon to the ragtag fleet, the stubborn morality of her commanding officer disrupts the tenuous balance of leadership which saw the canon fleet through to Earth, and will prove costly at times.**

**I have a pretty good idea of how the first three arcs of this story, before the Fall, from the Fall until the Pegasus meets the fleet, and until New Caprica, will go. I'm still deciding how to handle things after the evacuation of New Caprica.**


	2. Chapter 2

**I claim no ownership of any recognizeable setting, character, or plot element, but assert fair use. I make no money from this, and have very little money otherwise. A raddish might be red, but you can't bleed it any more than a turnip. **

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There was a raptor waiting at the spaceport, he just had to get there. As Alex wormed his way through rush hour traffic, he made the necessary calls. He checked if his fellow veterans at his new consulting firm had been informed. They had. He instructed them to hold back and let him negotiate. They agreed. He called the company's lawyer.

She'd be ready.

They told him that he'd be in communication with his former superiors the moment he was on the raptor. He was, and then some.

"In all my years in DRMD, I never had the President listen in."

On the other end of the line was the stiff and wary President of the Colonies, the ever-political Adm. Cain standing over his shoulder, and a decidedly uncomfortable looking Minister of Defense, who opened with, "Maj. Shadrach, I don't believe we ever spoke before. My condolences on the loss of Cmdr. Adams."

"Thank you, Minister, and it's Mr. Shadrach, now. I'm retired. To be fair, I was quite glad to have him above me, running interference with the politicians while I managed the disaster of the hour."

"Yes, Major, he is missed by all of us." President Adar joined the conversation, "What resources will you need to resolve this disaster?"

Ignoring the President's mistake as the raptor lifted off, Alex replied, "From what I've heard, the personnel I'll need are already contacted and being transported much like I am. I'm going to need information, every scrap of information you have on the accident, to assess the situation. The equipment for the comptometry and metrology departments are supposed to go up for auction on Virgon in two months. I know because I was going to bid on it. Pull the lots from the auction and get them to the site ASAP. They're almost as important as I am to the operation. I should have all the people I need to set up and operate it there, but a half dozen each comms, computers, and electrical ratings from the fleet under our direction would make it go faster. What fleet assets are on site?"

The President and Minister of Defense began to relax with the show of competence. Adm. Cain lifted some papers from the table, "Aside from the Pegasus, there are one Valkyrie class and one Jupiter class battlestars in orbit."

"Jupiter class? Athena or Galactica?"

"Galactica. Athena is being decommissioned this week."

"And non-battlestar assets?"

Adm. Cain checked the paper again. It was typical of her faction to ignore everything smaller than a battlestar. "A warstar and a fast cruiser, three destroyers, nine frigates, three tugs, one fleet and two merchant marine, various tenders including tyllium tankers, and two customs boats trying desperately to keep everybody out of Pegasus's way."

"If you could forward me every bit of information you have on the status of the Pegasus and what went wrong..."

"Corman's idiot son, her Commander." The President stiffened at Adm. Cain's outburst, while the Minister of Defense went back through looking more uncomfortable again, coming out on the far side looking nauseated. Politics must have interfered with other military decisions. Adm. Corman had campaigned for President Adar. "You'll see when you have the information. I'll get everything we know to you."

"Thank you. Now, for the matter of compensation."

The Minister of Defense rallied himself, "We are prepared to reinstate you, with the full rights and privelidges of the rank you were brevetted to on your retirement, and restore full funding to the DRMD." He actually looked proud of himself.

"No."

"But Maj. Shadrach, be reasonable!"

"Again, it's Mr. Shadrach. You cannot conscript me out of my retirement except in a time of war. Mr. President, your administration wanted to shift responsibility for disaster recovery to the private sector. Now I am the private sector, and we are coming at this from behind. I expect the same sort of compensation I saw flow like water from the defense coffers to various other private contractors over the years. I know damn well what a Mercury class battlestar costs, and I'm not going to ask for anything near that, let alone the cost of what will happen to Canceron if we do not recover the Pegasus. That isn't even considering the loss of goodwill on the part of the public for the military and your administration over how this disaster came about, nor the loss of goodwill on the part of the military for your administration for eliminating the office responsible for quickly solving this sort of clusterfuck."

By now, Adm. Cain looked appraising, the Minister of Defense looked horrified, and the President merely looked resigned. "What is your price?"

"I want a five year no-bid first-refusal contract for disaster response, a military liaison of command rank so a stubborn ship commander doesn't screw up my recover operation, ownership of the comptometry and metrology equipment we discussed earlier, Quorum-backed immunity and indemnity, both personal and corporate, for any actions we take to resolve your disasters, 750,000cb, and a Hephaestus class fleet tender, fully refurbished and stocked to its specifications when it was mothballed, as well as the licenses necessary to operate that ship, both personally and for my company. This is the contact information for my company's lawyer. She's aware of the situation. If she approves of the contract, we have a deal."

The President turned to the Admiral, "A Hephaestus class?"

"Do you mean the Scorpian Hephaestus class?" She asked.

"Yes. The reason Scorpia never suffered like Saggitaron."

"I'll need some time to run your requests past some departments. In the meantime, the Admiral and Minister will forward you everything we know. You'll have a response by the time you reach Canceron."

The signal cut out without even an opportunity to respond.


End file.
